The quadrate mind—A philosophical perspective: A response to Galanter

Abstract

Eugene Galanter writes of “the quadrate mind” because he takes “the structure of intellect to be divided into four (more or less) independent components: talking, drawing, planning and vuluing” (p. 285, italics in original). He sees these, moreover, as “intrinsic” or innate mental competencies. It is important, educationally, to identify these four components, because “the primary function of schooling in the academic sense is aimed at enhancing the innate capabilities” (p. 298). I see nothing but difficulties in all this. First, a point of clarification. When Calanter says the mind is quadrate he does not mean that mental phenomena in general are four-fold, only that intellectual mental phenomena are four-fold. But what is it to say the latter? It is to say that there are four intellectual skills or competencies which are “necessary and perhaps sufficient to represent the structural matrices of the child’s mind” (p. 289). I am not sure that this makes things clearer. For the following two reasons. First, given that we are talking about intellectual or cognitive aspects of the mind, rather than affective or conative aspects (and assuming one can divide things up in this way), why focus only on intellectual skills? Belief, for instance, is generally taken to be a cognitive phenomenon, but to believe something is not to perform a skill. ‘This issue apart, and accepting that we are concerned only with skills, what are we to make of the claim that the four skills are “necessary and perhaps sufficient”? This is a crucial question. If they are merely a necessary part of the intellect, then all sorts of other competencies could be necessary, too. If so, why pick out thes~fo~r! Things would be neater if they were not only necessary but sufficient, for then the claim would be that these four competencies alone constituted the intellect, at least at some fundamental level. This, too, would make sense of the expression “the quadrate mind.” The difficulty here, however, is that there seem to be other intellectual competencies besides these four-to do, for instance, with perceiving, with various forms of imagining (e.g., imaging, supposing) or more generally of thinking (practical thinking may be included under Galanter’s “planning,” but theoretical reasoning and contemplating seem to lie outside it). Mental phenomena are multifarious and complex. So are more strictly cognitive phenomena. Why, then, does Galanter concentrate just on four